Reconnecting with Ourselves through the Neuro-Affective Relational Model
Children are totally dependent on their environment for love and attention, which are as essential to a human child’s survival and development as food and water. As children, part of the way we make sure we get this attention is by becoming who our parents or our environment need us to be, often cutting off from who we really are in the process. Though cutting off from ourselves enables us to survive, our survival comes at a significant cost.
In my therapy practice, I specialize in helping people deal with anxiety, depression, shame, guilt, and addictions. These areas in which people commonly struggle have origins as survival strategies that arose in childhood in response to developmental trauma and unmet needs. We responded to childhood trauma by developing strategies that helped us get through those years. But these strategies may become limiting when we carry them forward into our adult lives and live according to old patterns when we no longer need to.
The strategies that once helped us survive the trauma of our early lives may now get in the way of being ourselves and who we want to be in the world as adults. We might feel perpetually disconnected from ourselves and others. Symptoms which stem from our old survival strategies are often what bring people to therapy for the first time. Below, I will briefly discuss survival strategies, which are often referred to as symptoms, and then will describe the NARM approach I use in my therapy practice to support clients.
Anxiety
Anxiety can be a survival strategy learned in childhood that helped us pay attention to our relational fears about the potential loss of connection with an attachment figure. The basis of an attachment relationship is that every child needs love and attention to survive, and we depend on our attachment figures to meet these needs. If we believed we were doing something our parents might disapprove of, we often experienced the feeling of anxiety as a signal that our attachment relationship to our parents, and our very survival, might be in jeopardy. We needed to change our behavior and ourselves to protect the attachment relationship.
What would my mother or father think or say or do if they saw me doing X or heard me saying Y or Z? Whatever we believed our parents would think or say or do, we internalized as our own as a way of protecting the attachment relationship and ourselves. We call this process of internalizing the responses we anticipated from our parents “identification.” Now, in our present-day lives, anxiety may come up when we get triggered in our relationships with our partners or at work, and anxiety is often coupled with self-criticism.
In response to feelings of anxiety, we might berate ourselves: I shouldn’t have said or done that. We may worry that a partner, a boss, or a co-worker is going to judge us, as we believe our parents would have judged us, so we turn the judgment on ourselves to preempt the judgment of others. Anxiety keeps us connected to our attachment figures from the past, and we experience it in the present through a range of uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, memories, and body sensations.
Depression
Depression can be a survival strategy a child develops to protect themselves from the pain of being continuously disappointed. As a child, if we experienced disappointment day after day, hour after day, and year after year, it might feel like we were in for a whole lifetime of disappointment, a life in which we would never receive what we longed for and needed. If it wasn’t safe to hope for much from relationships, if we could not trust that we would get what we needed from the environment we grew up in, then we might have depressed our energy, lowered our expectations, and developed the tendency to assume the worst.
This helped us, temporarily, to feel less vulnerable to the pain of additional disappointment. Lowering our energy and not holding onto hope made sense as a survival strategy under the constrained circumstances of our childhoods, but in our adult lives, this strategy can result in not really living our lives but being stuck in a holding pattern. Depression, which once helped us to survive, might now be preventing us from striving for anything and from living full lives.
Shame
Shaming ourselves is another way we learned to disconnect from ourselves in order to preserve an attachment relationship. Growing up, some of us learned that we must perform well to receive love, care, and attention from an attachment figure. High performance becomes a survival strategy to make sure we get the care we need. We learn to shame and guilt ourselves into performing in order to make sure we don’t let down the people on whom we depend, since we have learned that letting the attachment figure down would jeopardize the attachment relationship, and potentially our survival.
In our early lives, if we had to perform in order to receive love and attention, then in adulthood, we might continue to shame and guilt ourselves whenever we fear that we are not performing as well as we should. People commonly get triggered in this manner at work or in a relationship with a partner. Underlying these feelings of being triggered is the fact that shame is our way of maintaining our connection with the attachment relationship we developed with our parents. Even if our parents have passed on, we still carry the parental attachment relationship internally and we are wired to preserve this connection.
If we attempt to engage in something we believed wasn’t allowed in our families of origin, even as adults we still might feel that we should be going along with what others expect of us rather than being authentic and engaging in what truly matters to us. In the present, we may be living our lives from these memories of who we believed we had to be in order to receive love and care in our families, instead of from our adult consciousness in which we have choices about our lives.
Addictions
For some of us in childhood, it didn’t feel safe to be ourselves or to feel our feelings, and it wasn’t safe to attach and feel connected to others, or to trust in relationships and depend on other people to meet our needs. If that was the case, the use of drugs and alcohol is a survival strategy we might have learned to distance ourselves from our feelings and escape from our fears. When some situation or incident in our adult lives triggers memories in which we didn’t feel safe experiencing our feelings, we might turn to substances as a way of running from ourselves and disconnecting from our feelings.
The more significant our addiction, the more likely it is that we experienced serious trauma in our lives that we are trying to cope with through drugs or alcohol. Because the trauma felt so overwhelming, we needed something strong to pull us away from it, and it is understandable that we might turn to drugs or alcohol to combat this kind of serious trauma. When first using a substance, people might describe feeling more relaxed and finally getting some space for themselves. Initially, it can feel like a reprieve. But over time, people can get locked into using a particular substance and may feel imprisoned by it. Eventually, their dependence on the substance can result in them limiting their lives.
The Neuro-Affective Relational Model
My approach to supporting clients struggling in the areas discussed above is grounded in the Neuro-Affective Relational Model (NARM). In the NARM approach, we understand that our survival strategies, though potentially problematic in the present, served an important purpose in the past. In order to experience love and connection, which were essential human needs, we had to foreclose on who we were in order to be who we thought our parents or the environment needed us to be. But when we bring these strategies from childhood into our adult lives, they get in the way of being our authentic selves.
The NARM approach helps us reconnect with the parts of ourselves we cut off from in childhood, bringing more vitality into our lives. NARM therapy supports people to develop a differentiated sense of self, recognizing the ways we are different from our families of origin. Most children did not feel that their emotions were consistently welcomed in their families growing up. Through a NARM therapy approach, people learn to reconnect with feelings they cut off from as children in order to survive.
Reconnecting with these emotions can be scary due to the lack of acceptance and support people may be accustomed to receiving from their environment. Longing for support and connection and being continually disappointed can be excruciating. When we allow ourselves to feel our grief around particular childhood experiences, it might remind us of other times we felt the pain of disappointment, or the pain of being criticized for expressing emotions and perhaps being labeled “weak” as a result. Even feelings of love can bring up fears of rejection or judgment. With so much fear around feelings, it makes sense that people often disconnect from their emotions in childhood rather than feel them.
Through the NARM approach, a reparative therapeutic relationship is established in which emotions are welcomed. It can be tremendously healing to be supported as we engage in a process of naming what was missing from our early lives, and allowing ourselves to fully feel and grieve the losses, absences, and disappointments we did not allow ourselves to feel or grieve in the past. As we reconnect with our feelings in this supportive environment, we have the opportunity to reclaim parts of ourselves that we cut off from in the past. Restoring this connection to ourselves can deepen our lives in powerful ways. We can learn healthy ways to feel relaxed, calm, and peaceful inside ourselves, to create space for ourselves and our feelings, and to feel at home in our bodies and in the world.
NARM is a modern psychotherapy approach that combines aspects of other therapy approaches, including Gestalt, somatic experiencing, psychodynamic therapies, and mindfulness practices. NARM is both a top-down and bottom-up process. We work with cognitions and the ways we think about things (the top-down aspect), considering situations people find triggering and how these situations might connect back to our childhoods.
We also use the present moment and adult consciousness to process the memories and emotions that are stored in and felt through the body (that’s the bottom-up part). In a process called emotional completion, people are able to say and feel and make space for what we had to shut down and disconnect from growing up. NARM is a relational model, and the relationship with the therapist can provide a safe and supportive container where individuals can experience and release feelings it was not safe to feel during childhood. Through NARM therapy, we become aware of the ways we have been living from survival strategies developed in the past, and open up the possibility of going forward into our lives with more choice, compassion, and acceptance of our past and present selves.
Interested in learning more about NARM therapy or other therapeutic specialties? Contact me and get all your questions answered. Or check out our resources for additional information.